Ways to Find Time to Sleep and Exercise
Last week, I discussed the importance of the three pillars of health and fitness (sleep, diet, and exercise) to musicians. While it’s easy to say something is important, it's much more difficult to actually start taking action. That’s why this week, assuming you have the proper mindset, I’m providing some basic strategies to begin prioritizing sleep and movement in your day—even when it seems like you don’t have the time. I will break this up into 4 large strategies (scheduling, efficiency, self-care, and accountability) with examples under each category. This is a longer post, so feel free to skim or skip to a section that intrigues you!
1. The art of scheduling
The first strategy here is the strategy of scheduling because it is the one that worked the best for me. Take the time to sit down with your schedule and map out every single hour of the day that you have an obligation. Once you do this, you should realize that there is more time in the day than you may have originally thought. Without conscious scheduling, the “empty” hours become filled with social media or other procrastination techniques. Rather than keep these empty hours, you should fill them with deliberate exercise, and true time for self-care, or a wind-down routine before bed. Here are a few things to consider when determining what to add to your schedule.
Schedule your exercise
When I first began working out, I scheduled my gym times along my classes. I knew that at 12:00 T,TH, Sat, I would be doing a strength workout at the gym. Once this was in place, I made limited excuses to schedule things in that time. These were my hours to work on my own health, and they were just as solidified as any course I had to attend. If you are someone who thrives on actual outer accountability, sign up for a virtual exercise class that you need to attend a few days a week, or, hire a personal trainer with a set appointment time (see the accountability section for more thoughts on this).
Schedule your social media time
This is much more important than you would think. If you do not allot yourself a set amount of time for going on social media, you will most likely spend a lot more time on it than you would like. Social media has been designed to keep you hooked (see The Social Dilemma on Netflix if you haven’t yet). By scheduling it, you place limits on your usage and leave yourself with more time for other things within the day.
Establish a consistent bedtime and waketime
I only got this figured out this year since it's been one of my resolutions. I have made 10:30 my bedtime, and I wake up each morning (including weekends) at 6:30. This has made my life so much easier and my time much more productive. Prior to this, I would go to bed whenever my work was done (which was often around midnight), and wake up well past 9AM if I could. This sporadic schedule left me feeling drained throughout the day and gave me little energy to put my best effort into my work.
Scheduling a bedtime allows your body’s circadian rhythm to regulate in the way that it was intended to. With everything in sync, you will feel more energized. Additionally, if you schedule your bedtime and waketime in a way that gives you 7-9 hours of sleep a night, you will not need to put much thought into calculating it later.
Create boundaries between work and personal life
With email and social media, the boundaries between work, school, and personal life have been removed. Before this technology, people went home at 5PM and had the opportunity to be work-free until the next morning. Now, 24/7, we receive messages or emails about something for work or school. It has been expected that we respond to these things immediately, with little regard to having true personal time.
This year, I have decided to not read or respond to any email or work related text after 9PM or before 9AM. This gives me a chance to truly wind down before bed. It allows me an opportunity to be stress-free surrounding my bedtime and waketime—the two times impacted the most by negative events. If you are worried about something, it’s difficult to get to sleep, and if you are angered or saddened by something first thing in the morning, it’s difficult to have a good outlook on the day. Choose a “quitting time” and stick to it. After being consistent for a while, people will adjust to your schedule. The time you then get to unwind will be invaluable to your sleep quality.
2. Efficiency: doing less to get more
On one of my favorite podcasts, Mind Pump (I was on one of their episodes a few weeks ago!), the hosts often talk about finding the least amount of work to elicit the greatest amount of change. When it comes to having a busy schedule, this is imperative for making the most of your exercise. Depending on your goals, different exercises are better than others (ex. resistance training instead of cardio for fat loss). Here are a few of the easiest things you can do to get the most exercise benefits with your precious time.
Walk a few minutes each hour
As has been said recently, “sitting is the new smoking.” Prolonged hours spent sitting has been linked to increased hospitalizations, shorter life-expectancy, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. People who exercise for an hour a day but are otherwise sedentary have the same risk for these complications. To counteract this, you must move more throughout the day. The easiest way to do this is to make sure to get up and do something once an hour—whether that’s pacing, getting water, using the bathroom, or any other excuse to stand, it all matters. (If your goal is fat loss, this is also incredibly important as these small movements make up majority of your daily calorie expenditure.)
Start small
Is it too difficult for you to devote an entire hour to exercise within your day? What about 10 minutes? Incorporating three 10-minute walks into your daily routine gets you the 30 minutes of recommended exercise by the end of the day. The best strategy to build consistency is to schedule these surrounding your regular mealtimes. If 10 minutes is too much, then start with five. Everyone should be able to do five. Ensure you are not procrastinating on making these changes by waiting for the imaginary opportunity of having several hours of free time. As the saying goes, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Utilize HIIT wisely
I am a bit hesitant about recommending high intensity interval training (HIIT) as it is often abused and misused. In the past, I used it in a disordered way to attempt to torch calories to enable me to eat more. (Just so we're on the same page, HIIT is not the solution for fat loss.) For busy people, however, the short HIIT workouts may be what you need to start exercising with a minimal time commitment. HIIT workouts generally last only 5-20 minutes and involve short bursts of maximal intensity. Additionally, this type of training can only be done a few times a week as it is very taxing to your body. That means there are fewer workouts to fit into your schedule. Use HIIT as a last resort to find time for exercise, and make sure you do thorough research or ask a fitness professional about the proper ways to incorporate it into your life. The internet is saturated with videos and free programs that blindly promote HIIT for “quick” fat loss without accounting for individual differences in mental and physical health, so please make sure you have completely thought it through before beginning.
3. Conflating sleep and exercise with self-care
Many people keep their self-care time sacred, whether that be watching Netflix, scrolling social media, hanging out with friends, etc. By treating sleep and exercise as integral parts of your self-care, either through prioritizing them or pairing them with other rituals, you will naturally find ways to make the time for it.
Look forward to sleep
Sleep tends to be an afterthought because it’s seen as an unproductive use of hours that could be spent actually working. If you read my last post, however, you know just how important it is for optimal functioning and to make your day productive. Treating sleep as an activity you are looking forward to each night will allow you to prioritize it more. Think of sleep as the ultimate relaxation and time to unwind—it is the only time you truly get to do nothing each day!
Pair exercise with another leisure activity
In my post describing my health journey, I mentioned how I began to enjoy exercise by sitting on a recumbent bike and watching Netflix. This strategy of pairing was ultimately the key to my success, and it could be yours as well. If you are planning on spending time watching TV, reading, listening to music, or tuning in to your latest podcast, find a way to do it while exercising. For listening to music and podcasts, this can be done easily and cost-free by taking a walk whenever you want to listen. Watching TV, reading, or even studying can be done while pacing in a room, which is effective, but honestly not too exciting. If you have extra money or are ready to invest in your health, consider purchasing an exercise machine that you find enjoyable. For those college students who might not have the space or funds for a full machine, look into a rebounder trampoline. These trampolines are relatively inexpensive, take up little space, and are easy to store; you can jog, walk, run, or bounce on them. That’s actually how I spend most of my free time and get my winter exercise in now that gyms have been closed!
Make exercise social
If you are going to hang out with a friend, rather than suggest getting food or drinks, suggest going for a walk. In this way, you can enjoy each other’s company and disconnect from the internet for a while. Additionally, walking or pacing while talking to someone on the phone is also a brilliant way to get extra steps and movement in without taking additional time from your day.
4. Establishing outer accountability
Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies Framework describes the importance of how people respond to outer and inner expectations. (You can take her quiz here.) The largest portion of the population is comprised of obligers—people who struggle to respond to inner expectations but thrive on outer expectations. Obligers, this is the strategy for you!
Get a workout partner or personal trainer
If you find it hard to make time for yourself to exercise, get someone who will rely on you to be consistent with a scheduled exercise routine. A workout partner is a cost-free option, and it allows you social time. A personal trainer will meet with you to establish exercise goals and programing and is well worth the investment (#hireme). With either of these solutions, schedule a time that will be spent with the person consistently. This will make you feel guilty for missing a workout because someone else is counting on you to be there.
Have a friend make sure you stopped using your phone at a particular time
If you struggle to separate work from your home life, and to get adequate sleep, recruit a friend or family member to check in with you to make sure you are following your quitting time.
Use your phone's do-not-disturb or screen-time features
If you can’t find a friend or family member to help, technology has developed a way to do that for you! Utilize your phone’s do-not-disturb ability after your quitting time to block the notifications that would draw you back to work or social media. You can also enable a downtime function in which your phone locks you out of certain apps within a set timeframe or if you go over a time limit. I use both features, and while I can easily bypass them, it makes me take a second to truly think about what I’m doing.
Get a habit tracking app
I use an app called Streaks that allows me to mark whether or not I accomplished a specific goal or habit. Because I love getting virtual rewards and hate ruining streaks, seeing the screen turn gold once I hit all of my habits (steps, sleep time, yoga, reading, practice, etc.) is enough to make me put time into my day for them. If you are goal-driven and have a healthy dose of perfectionism, habit tracking apps will assist you in making time for exercise or getting the proper amount of sleep.
If any of these strategies and/or examples resonated with you, be sure to let me know and share with someone else who may benefit. I haven’t yet decided on what to write about next week, but it will be written. If you have any topic suggestions for me to cover in the future, let me know.